Flying? better keep some cash handy…

…. yes, there were times I have boarded domestic planes without having any cash in my pocket. When my wife told me about this news, I laughed saying it could just be a humor with the economic situation we are currently in. However, I noticed this post on Wired magazine today, that an airline indeed is planning to charge passengers for using the restrooms onboard. Given the conditions, I would probably not get surprised if airlines say, they would charge some money if you take a carry-on bag on board like they way some airles charge for Check-in bags now. I know the snacks, drinks, water are sold on-board, but it is interesting to see that creative idea of having a Pay-restroom on-board.

I wonder if that is also timed like pay phones – a dollar for 3 minutes and 50cents every minute then on. Of if it were to be pre-pay for “n” minutes, make sure to get out within that time, else no water, paper towel, hand soap dispensed!

Not sure where the economy leads us to, or I should probably say another way, we aren’t sure where we take the current economy towards…

Necessity Influences Creativity!

Spring is around the corner…

Last couple of days have been great here. Beautiful sunny weather during the day with temperature at high 40’s and low 50’s although night temparature goes down to low 30s. It is great to see the daylight stay a little longer and sunset around 5:45 or 6pm as opposed to 4:30pm in this part of the world.

It is also nice to see people getting out and take some fresh air – jog, walk, biking, etc. Also noticed number of motorcycles and bunch of convertibles. Out of these there were few Lamborghinis and Ferraris that we don’t get to see that often in this area…

It is probably another month or two when lots of boats making their way out to the nearby lakes….

Apparently, looking at the weather forecast, it is being predicted to be snow showers for one night next week end and is predicted to be raining for the rest of this week.

Reporting Reporting Reporting…

How much time do you spend on your status report at what-ever-job-or-business-you-work-with?

Per day, per week, per fortnight, per month, per year?

What is the value add? Who is the audience? How often is it reviewed? How many of those reports are looked back?

When started few years ago, I was a report junkie where I wanted provide the information nitty-gritty activities that goes on. Try to gather some numbers from the tools, formulate the charts, make them colorful, provide the risks and potential mitigation plan, etc etc…

I know the reporting makes it more meaningful provided it has the relevant information, at the same time, we also need to think about the cost involved.

When you look at the Project Management Hierarchy there are several cross functional teams, several levels of management, several applications, and several people of course, and few leads. There are reporting requirement involved at each every level in some way or the other. If you each one is preparing a report towards the same project, where the common goal of every individual, every element involved in the project is towards the project deliverable (you may add any number of factors to it viz., quality, complete functionality, etc etc etc), then think about the amount of time each individual puts in to create that report. Well, most times the specification of what the report should convey might be lacking in many situations, when you do have the expected format or certain expectations, every individual need to adhere to it.

Let’s assume there are about 20 people involved in a project and his/her own skilled areas. each one spending about 30minutes for “so-called-report” –> that makes it to 600minutes of your project time went into reporting and this repeats every week – even if it is 20minutes per individual – translates it to 400 minutes – and that’s about 8 to 10 hours of work.

In my mind, we need to come up with Tools to do such mundane repetitive tasks like gathering the numbers, consolidating the issues etc. Let our human brains do creative work.

Agreed, specially talking about road blocks and attempting towards removing them from the project individuals is what the project management should be looking at. and that would help keep the project healthy, but it is interesting to see the amount of time most projects put into merely status reporting.

borrowing this book from the library to understand what the author has to say about project risk management.

What is your opinion about reporting and how much time do you think would a project spend on such activity?

Learn to be disciplined, otherwise you will be forced to….

Noticed a great article on Wharton website through my linked-In connection about how the shopping experience has been and how it would be in near future. As I was reading through initial paragraphs of this article, my skeptic mind kept saying, “… just a temporary, didn’t we have similar economic cycles before? where those consumers, what did they learn? why did they change their habits again? on and on and on”. However as I proceeded further, I did notice few wordings that made me write this section and refer back to the original article. ” … definitely changed by what has happened. I don’t think they will go back to spending like they did, at least not anytime soon” –> the latter section of this sentence makes sense. World economy did wobble twice in past 2 decades, 1970s was another instance as I heard from people around here. and there was one in 1920s and 1930s. Well, does it mean people have kept their learnings through out? may be or may be not.

I also think, at times, such economic turbulences are unique and hard to compare.

further reading through the article for which I came up with the title on this post was the section with “Consumers have cut back sharply, not by choice, but because credit card companies and other lenders pulled their support for the consumption binge that fed into the current financial collapse” –> that is another profound statement. so people are being forced by the credit companies to be frugal. There has been a saying about “stay within your means / budget” when it comes to personal financial management. As I understand from my parents and many people around, this has been true (to most extent) when there was no credit card concept – either they had to borrow money (cash) from other people or banks or not buy at all (sort of envelopes way of budgeting) however, that is not the case anymore, just use the Credit Card and pay later (buy now pay later)

Well, it has both pros and cons with respect to economy.

It is a great article … read the rest [link]

b’coz I told ya…

Our daughter is no longer a toddler 2yr old – made me realize lately. There were days when we used to go around and she would ask me bunch of “why” questions and I used to get by giving some sort of answers, and those answers would already have the follow up questions tagged along from her. When I share about such experiences and specially about  “Whys” with others, they would say “hmm… looks like the ultimate answer we would have to respond children is ‘because i said so’” -

Well, off late, it appears like I started asking questions while bringing her back from school or while on way to school to drop her off. Now that she understands some of the traffic rules, she keeps an eye for any mistakes that I might do. anyways, aside, during our Questions and Answers sessions, she tries to answer several of my questions ; but if there are any questions that she’s not aware of the answers, or if she doesn’t want to respond, she has the standard answers: “Beccccaaaause, <pause>”

what would that pause mean? not really been aware all these days…

now she has started some more added to this incomplete phrase

“becccccaaaaause, I told ya!”

well, I know this answer doesn’t convice me, so I ask the same question again, reply comes back “B’coz I told ya!”

a Wheel has turned and it is her position to give such answers now?

IE8 – Internet Explorer 8

I have been using IE8 for past few weeks on my vista machine. It has been great so far. Not that I use every little feature in IE8 on my day-to-day basis, but at least with the extent I have used it, I haven’t seen any crashes. It has been great! It was several months ago when I learned about IE8 and started reading about it on IE blog – however finally installed an RC1 version…

downloaded IE8 from here; find more on IE blog [link]

Knowledge Management

I was at the SEASPIN presentation few days ago. The presenter Jeff Smith talked about  Knowledge Management and how it influences/impacts the organization. It was a great forum that we mostly discussed a lot on pros and cons. Listening to the audience there, Knowledge (information) management is not only an issue at the team level or an organization level or a company level, it appears to be at the industry wide. talking about this, there are gazillion number of tools and processes in place. There are practices and processes that get implemented and gradually disappears within a year or two.

certain teams try to consolidate all the documents in a single so-called “repository” and despite, documents are scattered everywhere. Have you been in a situation where you look for documents and find and search for them and still not able to locate those documents after hours and hours of search and finally create another copy. Well, at some point you would find duplicate documents around and not being able to make out the latest one. What would you do, would you merge them? would you review both the documents or would you judge on the latest modified date and keep the recent one? How do you even know that’s the legitimate valid document?

This kind of situation, in a way, turns into searching for the required information. Jeff puts this as “Search is a backup plan for a lack of Plan” –> I so agree with him, based on what we understand from the scenarios I described above. We end of searching for information when we fail finding at the known repositories and that boils down to lack of better planning in Information Architecture or Information Management.

It was a great insight overall. Thank you, Jeff.

Save, Spend, Income…

Interesting to see the news clips that are contradicting although some are internally supporting the reasons. It is like a saying we have in Kannada “haavu saaybeku kolu muribardhu” translate “kill the snake without breaking the stick” ; understood this saying might not be exactly related the situation we have, but it looks like Economy is expecting the people to spend when there are more and more people filing for unemployment, bankruptcies, going through layoffs and having trouble to make their ends meet to pay the bills at the moment.

 

I recently heard a debate on radio about about whether to pay stimulus to people or not pay but use that money for other projects to improve economy. someone said, even if people get the stimulus at this moment, it would either be saved or used to pay their bills and not necessarily spend at this point of time. so these are like ripple effects, one getting affected causes the chain of impacts all over.